Rar file format is well suited to compress big folders. If you oftentimes download stuff from information sharing websites such as Rapidshare, you’ve certainly encountered several files that are packed in the .rar extension. Most people use the shareware WinRar application to compact their documents in RAR files because they think there are of the benefits of encoding files with the .rar extension. Using this software, people can attain a big filesize reduction for the files and folders, and also divide a huge archive into several parts to make the files easier to be downloaded.
The problem is that we must use a suitable software to open Rar files. Fortunately, there are numerous archivers that can extract RAR archives, so that shouldn’t be a matter anymore. On the other hand, lots of people still believe that the only available application that supports the archive is WinRar itself, a commercial tool. There are actually alternatives.
One of the best applications that can extract .rar archives is 7-zip, which is free. Besides being a freeware RAR archive extractor and supporting the Rar archive extension, this application also supports a large number of other file formats. If you consider the variety of archive formats supported, you’ll probably be puzzled as to why such a nifty tool is distributed for free. Maybe some of you will even doubt that it is really freeware and not, say, adware, but it is truly entirely free. Install it and you’ll believe it. You can use it for free forever. All the features are enabled in the free version. Thus, feel free to visit their website and download the software.